Features

After three years rooted in leafy North Berkeley, with occasional escapes to even leafier Seattle, a week in Paris and four more in small-town Britain proved a salutary shock to the system for a commentator on East Bay buildings. 

A few impressions might be of interest in our present heated debate on appropriate development, for even though it’s a stretch to compare Shattuck Avenue to the Boulevard Saint Germain, some useful lessons can be learned from the Parisian centuries-old experience of crowded urban life.  

One is the importance of big street-trees. 

Lining the main avenues, elegant cliffs of apartments—typically six floors plus penthouse levels—are almost always accompanied by huge deciduous trees on generously wide sidewalks, often with a double row down the center strip, 

As a result, five or more stories are shaded for half the year by lush greenery, while the top—privileged—levels look down on a veritable linear park. 

Here in Berkeley, new and proposed apartment blocks like those on University Avenue at Martin Luther King and Acton respectively, could have similar sun control if the developer, in a fit of public spirit, would step his buildings back just a few feet. 

Small market towns in the still-extensive rural stretches of Britain offer myriad comparisons with our urban East Bay, particularly in the realm of traffic. Lovely old paved-over plazas—“market squares” in England—have become problematic parking lots, while the narrow streets through the old center are a test of nerve and skill even for natives. 

Saddest of all, the charmingly narrow roads contained between flowering hedges that weave over and around bright green toy hills are no longer safe to walk along or even cross, so that to go for a relaxed country stroll you must drive, just like here, to some distant regional park. 

And even on the narrowest roads—about one and a half cars wide—traffic goes mercilessly fast, making our driving up around, say, Point Reyes or Bodega Bay, seem absolutely quaint. 

Hay on Wye, an ancient stone-built town on the Eastern border of Wales 22 miles from Hereford, could hardly be more different from our East Bay garden suburbs. Locally famous these days as the “second-hand book capital of Britain,” Hay is an overgrown village of two-story row houses and dignified Georgian terraces, occupying a ridge parallel to the River Wye. Everything is part of a larger harmonious whole. You walk between gray stone blocks that contain apartments, shops, cafes and the ubiquitous bookstores, down alleys too narrow for urban trees, yet you feel no lack of greenery—for everywhere, over and between buildings, you see great wooded hills or the lush banks of the river. 

Here on our gentle East Bay shelf, the situation is reversed. Everywhere, a rectilinear grid of wide streets is bordered by small wood-frame houses in fussy gardens. Typically, it’s the city’s street trees, aided by huge off-street pines, redwoods and cedars, that constitute the real architecture. 

Except for the telephone poles! 

More often than not, the American suburban grid—no mean cultural achievement—has coexisted with utility poles and their sagging wires. Indeed, as neighborhood photographs reveal, we unconsciously block them out. 

Here in Berkeley, however, we can no longer achieve this visual denial, for almost suddenly, increased power demands plus improvement in wire protection and insulation have doubled the number of overhead lines and introduced cables that are thicker, blacker and uglier than ever—cables that, in the opinion of PG&E and the City of Berkeley, take undisputed precedence over trees (as the utility company makes clear in its flier on “reasons why we trim trees”). 

Looking through the stack of photos in my desk from my weeks in Britain of canal scenes, old market towns, etc., I find at most an isolated telephone pole out in the fields, but none at all in the town views. Presumably they’ve all been undergrounded, for the inhabitants of, for instance, Hay on Wye, enjoy exactly the same “high tech” as we do. 

One last observation for Anglophile friends who pine for thatched cottages and limestone farmhouses. To live in such harmonious pre-industrial settings, protected as lovingly as any BAHA Victorian, is to be under constant siege from the modern developer world of dull housing estates, huge edge-of-town Home Depots and even glassy office parks. Here, in our garden suburbs, with nothing to protect earlier than about 1880—other than endangered street trees—we might even be better off!